Just finished Thomas Metzinger’s new book The Ego Tunnel (which you can get for a few dollars at Abebooks — Amazon want some ridiculous price).
It’s a very good survey of current mind studies. Metzinger is a philosopher, but he’s up to date on the neuroscience, and there isn’t too much philosopher’s mumbo-jumbo. What there is, is quite eye-catching — I liked “affordances.”
Metzinger is thoughtful about the ethical/social/political consequences of the “consciousness revolution”:
We may no longer be able to regard our own consciousness as a legitimate vehicle for our metaphysical hopes and desires. … Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self.
One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another …
A very good read, worth the price just for the chapter on volition (Chapter 4).
Bradlaugh,
Do you have any opinion on the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness advanced by Susan Pockett and others?
I got & read Sue’s book after meeting her at the consciousness conference in Tucson last year. I’d describe my reaction as “Uh…”
It’s a book anyone interested in mind science should read, just for its originality. It’s short (170pp of text, plus a huge — 37pp — bibliography) and brisk, in a rather engagingly antipodean style:
I don’t think Sue has really bridged the gap implicit in the so-called "hard problem," though — the problem, that is, as to how processes in the physical world can generate qualia — felt experiences.
Not to me, it doesn’t. Here and at a few other places — her response to Objection Five, e.g. — I thought Sue ran out of number eight fencing wire. And the "universal mind" stuff at the end of the book was a bit … undergraduate, it seemed to me.
I’ll give Sue high marks for originality, style, and chutzpah, though, and urge anyone interested in this stuff to read her book.
Oh? What are the properties of the subjective experience of the color blue?
For that matter, what are the properties of any subjective experience? No one ever quite seems to state what they’re supposed to be.
Exactly. Explaining qualia only becomes a problem *after* someone manages to demonstrate their existence – a problem which is itself notoriously unsolved.
Explaining qualia only becomes a problem *after* someone manages to demonstrate their existence
LOL, so you are color-blind, taste-blind, etc… SEE no difference between red and blue, sugar and salt, c’mon…
The red/blue, sweet/sour differences, etc… AS WE SAMPLE THEM have nothing to do with the chemicals/nerves/pathways on which they obviously depend.
I read Tom Metzinger’s new book some weeks ago and talked with him last weekend at ASSC XIII in Berlin. The book is really just a promotional flyer for his earlier big book Being No One – which is heavy going and very serious in intent. The Kantian message is that we are immersed in our own virtual realities and condemned to regard them as real. Our inability to see our own qualia from the flip side as features of the shimmering EM field that surrounds the neocortex (here I sympathize with Sue Pockett despite reservations about her fencing-wire folksiness) is a brute fact about our incarnation as conscious agents. As for our being nought but a pack of neurons, fie. We might just as well say we are meat, period. I say we could swap out the meat or the neurons and keep the phenomenology, if we did it right, because what counts is the dynamical behavior of the EM field generated by rhythmic neural firing around thalamocortical loops. That field is a lot of decahertz photons forming transient symphonies of collective phenomena that way outstrip current physics. I guess their analysis will soon require a quantum approach and I therefore dub my view the photonic theory of consciousness. See my forthcoming book Mindworlds, due out later this year with Imprint Academic (Exeter, UK).
@Andy Ross
The Kantian message is that we are immersed in our own virtual realities and condemned to regard them as real.
Right, but this can be fixed by keeping it in mind, i.e. remembering at all times that we NEVER see the territory, only maps drawn by our “sensors” and not even maps of “things” but, as Bateson suggested, maps of differences.
This is my usual strongly anti-Platonist stance, objects don’t “exist” they are just convenient epistemological artifacts (even the math objects).
because what counts is the dynamical behavior of the EM field generated by rhythmic neural firing around thalamocortical loops.
You are pretty much going out on a limb here and… how different from the near denial “it’s only chemicals or neurons or whatever” is this explanation?
The right (preliminary) question could be WHAT would count as an “explanation” of qualias?
I agree that the neurons could be swapped out, but the question for subscribers to the EM theory is this: could the EM field also be swapped for something else while maintaining the phenomenology?
LOL, so you are color-blind, taste-blind, etc… SEE no difference between red and blue, sugar and salt, c’mon…
I certainly would be if my neurons didn’t fire.
What does Metzinger think will happen if we become “disenchanted” with each other? Does he think we will degenerate into a “Mad Max” society where we end up raping and killing each other? If not, what exactly is the problem?
Chris
I certainly would be if my neurons didn’t fire.
So you watch your “neurons firing” and then?
Though I do expect to have neurons and that they fire I do not rely on that for my everyday seeing or tasting.
How did they do before we knew about neurons, eh?
The only difference between them that I’m aware of is that my neurology is set up so that one type of signal occurs with red, another with blue, and certain associations are triggered by one signal and not the other.
There’s no ‘qualia’ there, and your statement has nothing to do with the idea of qualia.
Caledonian
one type of signal occurs with red, another with blue
Oh, yeah?
HOW do you know the difference between red and blue?
Are you measuring the light wavelength?
(I mean in your everyday experience, not in the lab)
Related digression and rambling.
It looks like the most important difference between “materialists” and “spiritualists” (in the common lousy acception of both terms) is that the former are blind to their primary subjective experience (the opposite of agnosia somehow) while the later posit that their primary subjective experience IS the whole world, hence the idea of the afterlife, since the whole world cannot plausibly vanish thus their subjective experience OUGHT TO go on forever as well.
If all we ever (can) see is the map, we might as well say the map is the reality and dump the Ding an sich, which is what the German idealists did after Kant. Then defects in the map become contradictions in reality, and we end up with something like dialectical materialism. Actually, we get the mindworlds picture outlined in my book Mindworlds. The mindworlds have a dual epistemological-ontological status that flips as we work thru a stack of worlds (perhaps with a 40 Hz rhythm).
Saying “it’s only the shimmering EM field” is analogous to saying it’s only neurons and so on, and is equally a hostage to fortune. but in the present state of the art it seems to me we can say no better. Perhaps we will go on to say it’s all just information (à la Tononi or Chalmers) but if we do that I think we need more physics for the information, perhaps out of quantum information theory, for example that massed qubits clump into qualia bubbles that pop with a characteristic rhythm – mindworlds!
Who knows? We’re all groping until the science begins to shape up here.
Though I do expect to have neurons and that they fire I do not rely on that for my everyday seeing or tasting.
Yes you do, you just deny it. Without your neurons firing your “everyday seeing or tasting” would not occur, whether you believe that or not. I could demonstrate this for you by removing parts of your brain, but it’s irreversible and illegal, so probably better not.
This is as silly as saying “Although I know Newton’s laws of motion exist, I don’t rely on them for my everyday walking around.”
How did they do before we knew about neurons, eh?
The same way we digested our food before knowing about chemistry, or breathed before knowing about aerodynamics. Lack of conscious awareness of the details of your bodily processes does not prevent them from functioning.
The fact that you can digest your food without *knowing* that chemical reactions are involved does not mean that chemical reactions *aren’t* involved, or that you “don’t rely on” them. Your subjective experience of reliance is irrelevant: no chemical reactions, no digestion.
Materialism, in this context, is the thesis that neural activity:perception::chemical activity:digestion. Your statements about what you subjectively rely on can’t constitute an attack on (still less a refutation of) this idea.